The present invention relates to apparatus and method for installing an elongated stretchable gasket in a longitudinal channel member and more particularly to a gasket which is rectangular in shape such as a refrigerator door gasket and installing that gasket in a channel member forming a rectangle secured to the refrigerator door adjacent the peripheral edges of the door.
A well known type of gasket assembly is shown and described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,469,383 and 3,359,053 assigned to the same assignee as the present invention. In those patents there is described a gasket of extruded resilient material such as rubber, polyvinyl chloride, or the like. The securement of the gasket to the refrigerator door is by means of a long metal retainer strip through which fastening screws will pass to anchor the retainer strip and gasket to the door. With such a prior art gasket assembly special skills and sometimes a lot of rework is required to overcome the inherent gasket mounting problems to make certain that the gasket is properly positioned on the refrigerator door to assure good thermal sealing characteristics. To overcome these difficulties a different type of gasket assembly and method was developed and is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,644,698 assigned to the same assignee as the present invention. In that gasket assembly there is provided elongated channel members having top, bottom, and side walls secured to the door adjacent the peripheral edges and have spaced screw openings therealong for screws that secure the channel members to the door. The channel members have a slot along the top wall and the sealing gasket has a base portion with a downwardly projecting winged dart having a body and two diverging arms projecting through the open slot in the top wall of the channel member to secure the sealing gasket to the channel member.
One of the difficulties with the invention described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,644,698 and in other gasket assembling apparatus and methods is that in the process of forcing the gasket into the retainer channel the gasket tends to stretch longitudinally relative to the retainer channels. The stretching is undesirable particularly when the gasket is rectangular shaped with the four corners joined together. The stretching of the gasket tends to bunch the gasket up at the corners so that the desired fit of the gasket to the refrigerator door to provide good thermal sealing characteristics is detrimentally affected.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,829,652, assigned to the same assignee as the present invention, discloses apparatus and method for forcing the gasket into the retainer channel without the undesirable stretching. One difficulty is that prior to utilizing that apparatus and method there is a need to place the gasket in its proper position relative to the retainer channel and hold it in place by manually seating the gasket at its four corners into the retainer channel.
By this invention, there is provided apparatus and method for installing a stretchable rectangular shaped gasket in a rectangular shaped channel member secured to a refrigerator door whereby the gasket is initially installed in the channel member at the four corners to hold the gasket in its proper position relative to the retainer channel member for subsequent complete installation of the gasket into the channel member without stretching the gasket longitudinally along the channel member.